Looking for a happy medium

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high …

I’m not sure if that Gershwin song is relevant outside of the states south of the Mason-Dixon line, but it’s been an earworm for me lately.

Here we are in the middle of July, just about the time kids start twiddling their thumbs and parents are scrambling for activities for them. With my mother, though, I learned early on to never say I was bored because once I did, I’d end up washing windows, picking up the floor, cleaning out gutters, mowing the yard and on and on. I’m pretty sure parents haven’t changed much from those days, and kids in the summertime still get bored, but I get the idea that thumb-twiddling is now passé.

I was trying to recall what kept me from being bored during summer vacation. Oh yeah … we’d disappear from the house before our mother marshaled us troops and gave us our daily assignments. Wait. I’d better stop right here before I begin spouting my grumpy ol’ “back in my day” screed again and reminiscing about me and my friends’ BB gun wars and playing chicken on bicycles. We’re older and wiser now and have put away those childish ways; most of them, at least.

I still have popsicles drip on my t-shirt.

In my lifetime, we’ve gone from typewriters to spellcheck, “number please” to cell phones, toothbrushes that plug into the wall, and even a car that helps a driver stay between the lines when leaving the Cap, thanks to science. Thinking about all that made me realize that some of the science I learned way back when is now out-of-date, owing mainly to, well ... science.

I was discussing this very thing with my grandson, who is studying physics in college.

For instance, I learned back in school that Pluto was a planet and not just a cartoon dog. While it’s still a cartoon dog, some 20-odd years ago the wiseguys in charge of what’s what at the Astronomical Union deemed that it was not a real planet anymore, but rather a dwarf planet?

They figured that since Pluto was part of the Kuiper belt and is pretty small – its diameter could fit inside the U.S. – it had no reason to call itself a regular planet. But the matter is still being argued by recalcitrant types.

I also recall being taught that Mars had canals, humans use only 10 percent of their brains, dinosaurs were killed off by volcanic eruptions, and that you could see the Great Wall of China from space. All those things are wrong.

This, to me, means that science is working as it’s supposed to. I mean, when one scientist proves a previous scientist got it wrong, that means the scientific method is working. Just as Thomas Alva Edison put it when the experiments in his lab failed to produce a light bulb, he said something to the effect that he hadn’t failed, because he had successfully discovered 10,000 ways not to invent a light bulb. And so it is that scientists are continually revising their findings, as well as the hypotheses of previous scientists.

For instance, science has now determined there is a direct relationship between the way the ball bounces and the cookie crumbles, and scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have successfully transformed lead into gold atoms, achieving an ancient alchemist’s dream through modern physics.

Anyhow, like the 1980s song by The Fixx, “One Thing Leads To Another,” who’d have thought that Gregor Mendel fooling around with pea plants would eventually lead to the world genome project. Einstein said, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”

And history, man, is that different. Over fifty years of stuff has happened since I was in school. Back when I was little, I was taught that George Washington had wooden teeth and never told a lie. I doubt if they teach that nowadays.

I’ve joked about how Gen-Zers seem, to me, different than regular people and how they may think this has always been a logged-in, password-approved, wireless world and know little about anything before they were born.

Fact is, there have been several decades of history added to what they taught me in high school, and there’s essentially the same amount of school hours to get the most important stuff in. That’s a lot of years to squeeze in, and some stuff gets squeezed out, apparently.

There’s no happy medium, I guess.

Heck, I can’t even remember how I reheated a cup of coffee before microwaves, but I do remember Pop Rocks, which was taken off the market due to rumors they made kids’ stomachs explode.

So, if I remember watching TV as John Glenn took off into space to become the first person to orbit the Earth, does that also mean I’m history?

Sheesh …